It was heaven. But it was humbling too, as I suspect real heaven will be. Should I by some chance make it there, I’ll see a lot of people who accomplished much more than I did... like my friend Winston, for one. It’s also humbling because my escape to temporary heaven where I got to do nothing resulted in... nothing. Life seemed to get along fine without me. Indeed, it seemed to get along a little too well, now that I think about it. Kind of the way school got along fine when I did play hooky. It’s also humbling because my escape to temporary heaven where I got to do nothing resulted in... nothing. Maybe a few people were mildly inconvenienced. I’ll know when I get up the courage to open the 174 unanswered e-mails in my inbox. But it’s not like the police were here when I got home with lights flashing on their squad car shouting through a bullhorn, “We’ve been getting all these 911 calls from the ‘Away’ message you left on your laptop!” I phoned a buddy last night and bragged, “I just took 10 or 11 days off from the whole world.” He said, “Maybe the whole world just took 10 or 11 days off from you.”
But I digress... My eldest daughter and young son would not be at the top of the list if my wife and I were recommending cleaning persons to hire. But, on the other hand, how could kids do more damage to the house than they’d already done over the past 24 years? Anyway, I believe our home insurance covers “acts of God,” which I consider kids to be. Because children, as much as we love them, are not something people would have thought up. If children were “acts of adulthood,” they’d be 30 when they were born, and we’d be the ones who took forever to mature. But I digress again... My wife and I played hooky. And what we did while playing hooky was what every busy person dreams of doing – nothing. We sat in the sun. We slept until whenever. We read at least a dozen books between us. We talked, although by mutual consent about nothing we were supposed to be doing at home or at work. If somebody felt like it, there was a walk (my wife) or a nap (me). We didn’t buy a newspaper or turn on a radio or have a television. We didn’t make the bed. We didn’t cook. Our meals were all takeaway except when we were using up the cute, in the little shore cafés. We had no other contact with the outside world. (Though I suspect a few surreptitious text messages from my wife to our kids to make sure they were eating something besides Cheese Whiz on potato chips – or, in the case of our daughter abroad, Camembert on macaroons.)
American Consequences
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